"Native American Realness": Address/redress cultural appropriation

Rosy Simas and Christopher K. Morgan
(photos: Tim Rummelhoff and Brianne Bland)

On Saturday, January 7, American Realness 2017 presented a conversation featuring Native American choreographers Rosy Simas (Seneca) and Christopher K. Morgan (Native Hawaiian) with Sara Nash, Program Director, New England Foundation for the Arts at Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room.

The afternoon session was organized by American Realness in response to concerns first raised in mid-December by Simas about the APAP-related festival's planned programming of a solo performance by Latifa Laâbissi, a French national of Moroccan lineage. (See Rosy Simas Reads Laâbissi’s "Self Portrait Camouflage", InfiniteBody, December 13, 2016.)  Sima's complaint and subsequent conversations with American Realness founder, curator and producer Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor led to an apology statement from Pryor, who had programmed the Laâbissi show in collaboration with MoMA PS1 associate curator--now Executive Artistic Director of Performance Space 122--Jenny Schlenka. Although Pryor quickly withdrew his organization's co-sponsorship of the Laâbissi event, MoMA PS1 kept the show on its APAP schedule. In the meantime, Simas and Laâbissi had an extensive conversation about the issue. 

The Native American Realness forum was convened on Saturday:

"to discuss the state of Native American performance work across the US and the epidemic of institutional negligence, insensitivity and attempted erasure of and towards Native American / Indigenous / First Nations’ values, histories and contributions to contemporary artistic practice. This conversation seeks to investigate how our dominant culture’s historical insensitivity aids in forms of cultural appropriation, Redface, and racism in artistic practice, spectatorship and presenting. Does Redface sell? Is curating Native artists seen as risky, unsellable, or uninteresting, or does this speak to institutional and societal ignorance?"

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.--co-founder, with Ricarrdo Valentine, of Brotherhood Dance!--attended this session and contributes a report.

Native American Realness

by guest contributor

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

Native American Realness was nothing short of a resistance that's been happening for over 500 hundred years. Artist Rosy Simas from Minneapolis initially sparked what's part of a larger fire as it relates to indigenous performance, life and well-being. Simas challenged the annual American Realness festival to reexamine why it would present Latifa Laâbissi's Self Portrait Camouflage, a Red Face performance, an appropriation by an artist who may or may not have done the research on indigenous performance.

Laâbissi was not there to defend her work and dialogue with Simas. Should she have been?

The conversation opened with each person stating their names and if they belonged to any indigenous nation--a traditional way of opening the space and filling it with ourselves and our ancestors. The first questions posed for the room were loaded yet poignant: What is "Red Face" and why is it problematic? Why is it programmed? We further questioned: Why does Red Face programming get funded in the United States while Native American artists do not? Boundaries were set so that Indigenous people in the room would speak first.

It should be noted that not every cultural institution would have the integrity to share their failure so publicly and be willing to host the provocateur and many others who stand in solidarity. And they did this only a month after the controversy arose. Response plus action.

Red Face is a racialized representation of Native American people similar to Black Face in America. Red Face is the impersonation of Native American people by white people of European descent, though not exclusively. People of color can also objectify their own cultures as well as others. Educational structures and cultural production sectors use this and other similar mechanisms to control the image of Native Americans. These efforts continue to write Native Americans out of their own stories, never affording space or access to funding for Native Americans to write their truths.

As the conversation progressed, further challenges emerged around intention and the research process. Who is authentic? For bodies of color, entering European performance spaces is a radical act in and of itself.

Participants questioned how context can be provided for the audience. Should it even be provided? When it comes to esthetics, what is disruptive? If the standard is European esthetics, then we must question who is radical. Someone mentioned a recent performance by Will Rawls that was sourced in Balkan dance traditions. What does "radical" mean for different cultures? In the words of Rosy Simas, "If an artist says it's radical, shouldn't we believe them?" Contextualizing performance is left up to the artist who must negotiate how much they want to let the audience in on their intended communication.

As the ninety-minute conversation ended, everyone realized that this was only a beginning to the work of excavating the dissociative culture we live in and its reluctance to process the trauma suffered by indigenous cultures. How do we heal?

Native American Realness was an opportunity for cultural workers and community members to have open dialogue about the misrepresentation and appropriation of Native culture and performance. This conversation was an example of how cultural production platforms and artists can work together to incite change, offering healing resistance with rigorous dialogue and harmonious creative space.

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Orlando Zane Hunter Jr. is a choreographer and dancer who researches, illustrates and creates from an African-American male perspective. In his work, he tackles issues resulting from a capitalistic imperialist patriarchal white supremacist system. Hunter grew up dancing hip-hop and graduated with a BFA in Dance from University of Minnesota, where he performed works by Donald Byrd, Bill T. Jones, Carl Flink, Louis Falco, Colleen Thomas, Uri Sands, Stephen Petronio and Nora Chipaumire. His solo Mutiny was selected to represent the University of Minnesota at the 2011 ACDFA gala in Madison, Wisconsin. Orlando studied LGBT activism and history in Amsterdam and Berlin. He has performed with Christal Brown/INspirit Dance Company, Contempo Physical Dance, Forces of Nature, Makeda Thomas, Threads Dance Project, TU Dance and Ananya Dance Theater, an all-women’s company where he was the first male member and toured with them to Trinidad & Tobago and Zimbabwe. Hunter is a co-founder of the collective Brother(hood) Dance!

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APAP SEASON CHOICES: Dana Michel

Dana Michel performs Mercurial George
in this year's American Realness festival.

The Black Canadian dance artist Dana Michel--who made a big splash at home and here in New York in 2014 with her solo Yellow Towel--is back with a new solo, Mercurial George, at Abrons Arts Center for American Realness.

She has described the hour-long piece as an act of “wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig” asking “What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body?” A seeming extension of Yellow Towel, with its genesis in racial stereotypes, Mercurial George implies the release of an authentic identity not imposed by others.

This is pertinent for exploration. Identity and marginal otherness--from immigration status to religion to gender--are battlegrounds with renewed real life-or-death stakes in the current moment. And Michel is a curious, fearless explorer, eccentric and mercurial indeed in her body language, fascination with the odd prop oddly used, and tendency to randomly mumble or declaim. She opens dimensions of mind and body that we usually declare unseemly and diseased and seems to say, "Look what else is here."

It's an interesting task and an interesting approach, requiring a performer who can submerge her calm, charming persona and grab hold of a viewer, no matter how resistant, for the space of an hour. Not easy. Go take a look and see what else is there.

Mercurial George
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Here's a mini-interview with Dana Michel

on the occasion of her January 2014 presentation of Yellow Towel

for American Realness.

(And here is my review of that show.)

Mercurial George will be presented again on Monday, January 9 at 4pm and Tuesday, January 10 at 7pm. Run Time: 55 minutes. For information on this and other American Realness events, now through January 12, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
(Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Cuba's DanzAbierta presents "Showroom" at The Joyce

Review: Cuba’s DanzAbierta debuts at The Joyce Theater
by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, ZEALnyc, May 15, 2016

Fight fire with fire: Byrd's "The Minstrel Show Revisited"

Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater
in The Minstrel Show Revisited
Below, l-r:
Fausto Rivera, Alex Crozier and Alexis "Tilly" Evans-Krueger
(photos: Ian Douglas)

The black-faced mask of minstrel shows is a lingering image from America's past that still inflicts wounds today through its psychic hold...In the future if we are to be free from its terrible grip we must confront it boldly and courageously by staring back into its face and laughing at the absurdity of its representation until it no longer has the power to hurt us. Only then will it be vanquished and we are free to be. -- Donald Byrd

You might have thought Donald Byrd would bury the tough stuff somewhere down inside The Minstrel Show Revisited and gradually ease you into it. But this dance-theater piece--sourced in Byrd's provocative 1991 Bessie-winner, The Minstrel Show--opens with the problem right before your eyes: a white male dancer singing that classic rag, "A Hot Time in the Old Town," in blackface and Afro wig. It doesn't ease anything when more blackfaced dancers from Byrd's multiracial Spectrum Dance Theater join in--peppy entertainers whose high kicks and high jinks, tumbling and sexy hip-pumping establish a through-line from 19th Century minstrelsy to today's musical theater.

In the program for The Minstrel Show Revisited's run at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Byrd reprinted Scott Delahunta's essay for the original production. Delahunta argues that stereotypes are a survival mechanism, making complexity less challenging and reality less threatening. They worked for white Americans faced with an African population they could no longer define and claim as property. They still work, today, for white Americans faced with the looming prospect of no longer being the majority group in this country. And that's just for starters.

Rather than shrink from mindless and noxious stereotyping, Byrd wallows in it for the sake of doing exactly what popular entertainment is not supposed to do--hold a merciless mirror up to the people who have paid to be distracted from problems. "We like to laugh, to cry and not have to 'think too much' and in doing so we become complicitous in the process of stereotyping," Delahunta wrote. Thus the tension in The Minstrel Show Revisited. The choreography and performances are skillful and dynamic. But, if you pay close attention, you become aware of how hollow and shallow the stage picture, for all its activity, looks and feels.

Over the course of the hour, Byrd's dancers not only dance a lot but also line up to tell an alarming number of offensive jokes aimed at a diversity of targets. But reworking 1991 also gives Byrd the chance to open the piece to audience participation, inviting several folks up on stage to tell the last racist joke they heard. (When I saw it, most of his volunteers happened to be youngish people of color.) This strategy encourages the watcher's Inner Performer to come out and play. It's safe, and it's not safe. It's bad...but it's permitted.

How will the volunteers respond to that invitation? How will the rest of us--sitting not so safely in our chairs--respond to what we're about to hear?  It's complicated!

How quickly the volunteers learned just the right intonations and body language for their brief interaction with Byrd. How easily they remembered and told their jokes.

OMG! Look at all these people running around with offensive jokes in their heads! And what was the last offensive joke I heard?

We giggled some because the tellers were cute and brave, and we knew they didn't mean what they said. It felt okay--sort of. That is, until the final and truly cringe-making one, which--whoa!--brought everybody up short.

And even then Byrd wasn't finished with us. He looked out over the house and urged people in the seats to write down a stereotypical joke to be collected and used later. Since I did not stay for the post-show Q&A--the theater seemed unusually tardy in getting it started--I can't say how that worked out.

In his pre-show talk, Awam Amkpa (NYU Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis) noted, "Art does not just reflect culture; it makes it." Byrd accepts his responsibility, as artist and entertainer, to highlight how the arts have served to deliver, spotlight and perpetuate stereotypes, making them not only useful but seductive and addictive. His work work offers no solution but a tap on the shoulder: Now, your turn.

Closed.

For more information on Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater, click here.

For information on upcoming events at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, click here.

Saner's "Primitivo": indigenous imagery and perspective

In the Face of Violence, a Mexican Artist Finds Sanity in Stereotypes
by Julie Schwietert Collazo, Hyperallergic, January 30, 2015

Carrie Mae Weems retrospective at Guggenheim Museum

Carrie Mae Weems: 
Three Decades of Photography and Video

Guggenheim Museum

January 24-May 14

Carrie Mae Weems
A Broad and Expansive Sky—Ancient Rome (from Roaming), 2006
Chromogenic print, 73 x 61 inches (185.4 x 154.9 cm)
Private collection, Portland, Oregon
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems
Untitled (Man and mirror) (from Kitchen Table Series), 1990
Gelatin silver print, 27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches (69.2 x 69.2 cm)
Collection of Eric and Liz Lefkofsky, promised gift to The Art Institute of Chicago
© Carrie Mae Weems
Photo: © The Art Institute of Chicago

New York Times critic Holland Cotter's otherwise admiring review of Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (here) chides the Guggenheim Museum for not devoting its central, spiraling rotunda to Weems. Right now, if you visit the Guggenheim, you'll find that sloping spiral roped off in preparation for the upcoming Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe and that show's crates filling much of the ground floor.

The original Weems retrospective, curated by Kathryn Delmez, opened in September 2012 at Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts. According to Cotter, the Guggenheim omits some works included in previous stops along the show's tour, and the exhibition has been broken up into galleries scattered over a few floors. Cotter points out that, for a first New York retrospective of Weems's career, thirty years worth of work, the limited selection and spatial placement give this Black American artist, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, short shrift. Cotter's argument seems all the more reasonable and urgent once you appreciate Weems's entire mission, which is all about visibility--to underscore and creatively document presence and experience against racist, sexist omissions and erasures.

She has done this, magnificently, in a variety of ways. Often putting her own body--at once, deific and down-to-earth--front and center in her photography and video work is the boldest stroke. Whether facing us head-on and meeting our gaze with her own or, by turning her back to the camera, slipping into iconic anonymity as in her dramatic Roaming series, Weems answers a denying world with defiance as if to say, Without my presence, you could not have come to be what you are.

I took a tip from Frida who from her bed painted incessantly--beautifully while Diego scaled the scaffolds to the very top of the world. -- from Weems's text for Not Manet's Type (1997)

Weems claims space for African and Afro-Atlantic realities, for people of African descent, particularly women, and our families and communities within society and its art.

Weems also exerts an artist's right not just to make new stuff but to appropriate existing objects--say, J. T. Zealy's daguerreotypes of "Negroid types" from slavery days--sealing these excavated memories under glass etched in white text, seizing control of how they will be seen and understood. She brings marginalized history to the table just as, in The Kitchen Table Series, she brings everyday eros to the table. Because she locates herself or others in historical time and in dreamtime and in something eerily combining the two--see her 2008 video Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment--we come to understand that we can do and often do the same.

The Guggenheim show might not have everything it could have or take pride of place in the main gallery, but it does educate and inspire (Guggenheim visitor information). See also Brooklyn Museum's Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (closing March 9).

Dana Michel's "Yellow Towel" at Abrons

Dana Michel
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Dana Michel sidles out from behind a white curtain stretched along one wall. She seems shy, at first, not sure or secure about being seen. She's dressed in a black hoodie that hides her long dreadlocks, and in black slacks and shoes with thick soles. Her tense arms anchor her balled up hands like stumps at waist height. She moves in stiff, tiny jerks and twists of ankles and elbows and does not look at us. What's that box-like object poking out from the back of her hoodie? What are those squawking noises coming from her mouth? What's that white stuff smeared around her mouth?

"Ah...ah...obviously, I am the creator, and this is my house...."

We're at American Realness 2014 in the Experimental Theater at Abrons Arts Center, watching a performance called Yellow Towel, a US premiere of a work by a Canadian dance artist.  But it sure seems like we're trapped in a room with one of those eccentric street people we consider damaged goods and give wide berth. We're trapped for 75 minutes, forced to look at and listen to this person who moves in front of these white curtains like animated Expressionist brushstrokes rendered in thick black paint. She's a living piñata whose garments erupt in showers of Q-tips or rubber bands. When she goes with her impulses, she's all body--spread, contorted, vulgar, messy--and working on her own system, taking her time with everything in an environment that, except for her occasionally lucid mumblings and outbursts, can be dead silent.

That baseline quiet, and that pace in which little happens and what happens makes little sense, controls us. It is her show. A kind of victory in that.

Michel's publicity sources Yellow Towel in her childhood envy of girls with blonde hair and suggests that the solo probes Black stereotypes via her revealing, uncensored alter ego. You have ample time to think about that and what it might mean that her alter ego owns a laptop upon which she drapes a big, curly Afro wig.

I first saw Dana Michel performing a solo--the greater the weight--in the spring of 2007 at PS 122's DANCEOFF! series and noted that the Montreal-based artist was a "killer soloist" with "fiery authority." Seven years later, in Yellow Towel, she is no less than that.

Yellow Towel is now closed. For information about other American Realness 2014 events at Abrons Arts Center (through January 19), click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

What's next for The Black Swan?

No, not that one!

Click below to read about Black ballerina Aesha Ash's Swan Dreams Project.

The Black Swan Diaries: The Next Step
by Aesha Ash, The Black Swan Diaries, October 29. 2011